# 67 Japan’s Contradictions & What They Teach Us About Our Inner Conflicts
On mindfulness, excess, and tolerating ambiguity
At 5 a.m. in Shibuya, Tokyo, a drunk salaryman exits a neon-lit karaoke bar, ducks into a cheap 24-hour izakaya, orders a highball with a plate of fried chicken, and watches commercials for dating apps and pachinko parlors flash by on his phone. His world is technological, artificial, and mass-produced.
At the same time in Nanzen-ji, a Zen Buddhist temple on the philosopher’s path in Kyoto, a monk rakes the gravel. With careful, repetitive motions, she creates circles and unbroken lines from the stones at her feet. Her world is traditional, natural, and hand-crafted.
The scenes seem opposite, yet both feel authentically Japanese.
How do they exist side by side?
Country of Contradictions
On and off, I just spent two weeks in Tokyo. I went from underground speed trains to sky-high escalators, and from luxury malls in glass towers to museums where the human-designed art was largely generated by computer algorithms—more about that next week!
I moved among people shopping for the cutest stuffed animal key rings and the latest manga and gadgets. The number of stores, eateries, and vending machines was staggering. LED screens beckoned me as I tried to escape fluorescent signs.
I enjoyed my time in Tokyo, but the excess of everything exhausted me. Even in our tiny apartment on the 24th floor, it was hard to find rest, sandwiched as we were between a highway and railway.
I was mostly a bewildered witness, not a participant of this city life.
What a contrast Tokyo was with the six calm weeks I spent in Kyoto. There, I lived in a traditional Japanese house in non-touristic neighborhood and walked or bicycled from a tea house to a small shrine or spent the day walking along the Kamo river with the locals.
I wonder: How can the Japanese be so devoted to consumption and pop culture while being so mindful and reverent of the past?
It’s not like half of the country swings one way and the other half the other way: The contrast often exists within individuals. People who spend a lot of money on (fast) fashion and trendy headphones visit shrines, spend hours admiring cherry blossoms, restrain from being a nuisance in public, over-indulge in sweet potato puddings and matcha ice cream, build rock towers in the riverbed, repair broken tea bowls, and buy plastic samurai swords and kitten socks.
Where I see a conflict between two different ways of being in the world, the Japanese seem to just live their lives.
They move fluidly between different spheres. They can commit to formality and hierarchy at the office, respect silence and equality in public places, and embrace laughter and excess when in a bar with friends.
Do they not feel the tension of embodying incompatible views? Or do they not perceive the views as incompatible?
Oppositional Thinking and Inner Conflicts
I was raised in the West and grew up with oppositional thinking, the tendency to divide the world in strict categories. Things are either this or that. People are either smart or stupid, kind or rude, worthy of attention or not. They’re either with us or against us.
It’s a way of thinking that breeds conflicts in global politics, local communities, and within ourselves.
As I was growing up, I tried to be clear about who I was. Knowing that others would judge and categorize me, I didn’t want to claim being one thing and show evidence of being another.
I wanted to be consistent in my identity. But that was hard. Is still hard.
As a vegan in my late twenties, I felt like a hypocrite for wearing leather shoes: I was not a real vegan. Ten years later, I felt seen when Roxane Gay wrote about the discomfort of being a bad feminist, someone who holds feminist values yet doesn’t always live by them. Now that I’m a minimalist nomad, I experience moral anxiety when I want to buy a new Japanese crossbody bag while the secondhand in my possession does not yet need to be replaced. Often I feel like a failure when I start my day with yoga and finish it with drinking too much sake.
In bed I think about my “bad deeds” versus my “ideal identity” and how best to stay true to myself. But what part of me is most authentic? My open love for Kyoto or my repressed fascination for Tokyo?
Dialectic, Deconstruction, and Nagomi
The problem of oppositional thinking has been on my mind for years. Decades even.
In college, I was all ears when I heard about Hegel’s dialectic, the theory that our understanding of the world evolves through the resolution of contradictions. When ideas collide, we can bring them together in a higher, unified truth.
This spoke to me, until I felt the violence in Hegel’s union. An ambiguity is only “resolved” by the suppression of anything that is “other” and by forcing opposites to change.
Soon, I grew more fascinated by the French postmodernists, especially Derrida’s deconstruction. He writes that things derive meaning from what they are not and that it would be a mistake to force all otherness into a unifying whole. We should accept that a stable, definite truth remains unattainable for us.
Although postmodernism was helpful to me in theory, I never fully escaped oppositional thinking in real life. Especially not when judging myself.
Recently, I’ve become enamored with nagomi (和み), a Japanese philosophy of finding balance and being at ease amidst conflicting desires and ideas. It teaches how to tolerate ambiguities in the world and within ourselves.
Does nagomi explain why the Japanese seem to suffer less from personal and cultural contradictions than I do?
I’m tempted to say “yes,” of course, and resolve this essay into a neat thesis: Japan has mastered contradictions and offers a model for the rest of us. But that would be too clean, and likely untrue.
Still, nagomi lingers in my mind and I promise to keep you posted.
Tolerating Ambiguity
I’m in Japan for the third time now and am already planning to come back. Living here, spending time in Kyoto and Tokyo, in the countryside and in the cities, has opened me to the possibility of letting opposites exist side by side within myself.
To care about simplicity without renouncing pleasure. To honor the past without resisting the future. To rake gravel (or practice yoga) and drink highballs (or sake) without constant self-interrogation. To move between mindfulness and excess without forcing myself into one unified identity.
Change and variations are natural parts of life. I may try to stay consistent, but all definitions, even the ones we create for ourselves, are limitations.
We don’t have to be one kind of person all the time. We can hold multiple opinions and inhabit different versions of ourselves. We can be present for all the contrasts our life holds. We can say: Right now, I am here.
I’m Claire Polders, a Dutch author and nomad.
I was born in Gouda—yes from the cheese—studied philosophy, moved to Paris, married an American, switched to writing in English, and fell in love with Japan.
For Wander, Wonder, Write I publish essays on my travels, my life, and my writing.
Find out more about my novels and stories on my website www.clairepolders.com.
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Time to Say Goodbye
I’m in the beautiful yet rainy mountains of Nikko this week, meeting troops of Japanese snow monkeys and admiring the famous and opulent Toshogu Shrine.
Next week, around this time and if all goes well, I will be in the air, traveling from Tokyo to Istanbul via Kuala Lumpur.
All my best,
Claire
P.S. How do you deal with inner conflicts?
This thoughtful essay bears down well on a conflict that only 'Westerners' confront in parts of Eastern and Southeast Asia. I think East Asian tradition is more malleable and adaptable, in the same way that Buddhism is non-confrontational and does not require adherence to a rigid list of rules (like Christianity does). It is very interesting to see, I enjoyed the detail you gave about Japan to support this observation.
Great article. We visited Tokyo for the first time this year and want to return to see more of Japan. I feel like we barely scratched the surface. Thanks for this peek into your conflicting musings.